Chapter 5 #3
"I'm your FTO." Each word set down like a brick.
"I sign your evals. I sign your probation.
You understand what that is? What we just — that's not a mistake, Rask, that's a career.
Yours. Before it starts. And mine. Twenty years, gone, because I couldn't — " He stopped.
Started again, colder, because the crack in his own voice frightened him more than anything on the call had.
"It can't happen. It's not going to happen.
I let the — the call got to me. That's all that was.
The after. It happens. It doesn't mean anything. "
He watched that land. Watched it doesn't mean anything go into the kid like a blade, and he did it on purpose, because a clean cut heals better than a ragged one, that was true of skin and it was true of this, and if he wounded the kid badly enough right now the kid would stay away and stay safe and stay employed and stay alive, and that was the only thing Dom had left to give him, the only kind of care Dom knew how to do anymore: the kind that pushed you off the edge before the edge could give way under your weight.
"You don't believe that," Jonah said. Quiet.
Not pleading. Just — certain, the way he'd been certain on the step.
His eyes were still wet and now there was something under the hurt, something steadier, and it was worse than if he'd cried.
"You kissed me. I didn't do anything. You crossed the whole bay.
So don't stand there and tell me it doesn't mean anything, because I felt it mean something, I felt your hands—"
"My hands don't get a vote." Dom stepped back. Another foot of dark between them. "Go find the sergeant, get the run number for the trauma. Then check the rig. We've got eight hours left."
"Dom." The kid took a step after him, and there was no calculation in it, no strategy, just a person following the warmth he'd found, and that was the thing Dom couldn't stand, that was the thing that would get him killed — the kid didn't know how to protect himself, would walk straight off a roof toward another person the same way he'd knelt in a filthy bathroom, all in, no seatbelt.
"You said don't do what you did. Twenty years, carry it alone, don't be you.
You just said that. And now you're standing here doing the exact—"
"That's different."
"It's not different, it's the same thing, it's the same—"
"That's an order, Rask."
And that did it. That was the cruelest one, and he'd known it would be — pulling rank, using the exact power gap that was the whole reason this was impossible, wielding the thing that made them unequal as a weapon to shove the kid back into his place.
He watched Jonah absorb it. Watched the words that's an order do to him what nothing on the call had — watched the last of the wide-open thing shut all the way, watched the mask come back up over the hurt, and it was a bad mask, a hasty one, Dom could see the damage right through it, and he made himself keep his face flat while the kid put himself back together in front of him.
For a second Jonah just looked at him, and there was something in the look worse than anger, worse than the hurt — it was recognition.
The kid had spent four days learning to read Dom and now he was reading him, seeing the whole ugly machine of it, the protection dressed as rejection, the care shaped like a blade, and understanding exactly what Dom was doing and being unable to stop him from doing it.
"Yeah," Jonah said finally. Rough. "Copy. That's an order." A breath. "You're really good at this, you know that? Making people go away. That's — no wonder your hands are the only steady thing left. You've had so much practice."
It landed. The kid meant it to land, and it did, right in the soft place, and Dom took it without a flicker because taking it was the price and he'd already decided to pay it.
"Yeah," Jonah said finally. Rough. "Copy."
He walked off toward the ER doors to find the sergeant, and Dom stood alone in the far dark corner of the ambulance bay where the light didn't reach, where he'd meant to ride out the after alone the way he always did, and found that his hands — steady on the blade, steady on the kid's face, steady for twenty years when it was somebody else's life — were shaking now.
Just his hands. In the dark. Where nobody could see.
Where he'd made very sure nobody could see.
Dom pressed them flat against his own thighs the way the kid did, the way he'd watched the kid do on day two, and stood there in the after alone, exactly the way he'd wanted, exactly the way he'd arranged his entire life to guarantee, and told himself it was the right call.
It was the right call. He knew it was the right call.
He'd known Ray's stethoscope was in the bottom drawer of his locker for eighteen months and had never once opened the drawer, and he knew that was the right call too, and that was the thing about right calls, the thing nobody warned you about when you started: you could make every right call, a whole career of them, a whole life of them, and still end up standing alone in the dark with your hands shaking and nothing left in your chest but the flat clean quiet of a room where the emergency was already over.
Eight hours left on the shift.
Dom made his hands stop, because he could still do that, that one thing, when he had to. Then he went to check the rig.